[HN Gopher] Generals.io - Capture enemy generals to defeat them
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Generals.io - Capture enemy generals to defeat them
Author : emj
Score : 236 points
Date : 2023-12-24 09:38 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (generals.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (generals.io)
| _private wrote:
| nice little game!
| shakezzz wrote:
| What do you think are they using for the map?
| codefined wrote:
| One of the original devs here. The map is just html with
| position offsets!
| ivanjermakov wrote:
| HTML table
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| I used to play the 8-player version of this game a lot. Here's an
| analysis of the strategy. I put it in rot13 in case you prefer to
| discover for yourself.
|
| Gurer ner 3 onfvp fgengrtvrf va gur rneyl tnzr:
|
| 1. Encvq nffnhyg. Jnvg sbe n qrprag-fvmrq nezl ba lbhe pncvgny,
| gura fgneg punetvat nebhaq gur znc naq ubcr gung lbh ner noyr gb
| pncgher nabgure cynlre'f pncvgny juvyr vg'f cbbeyl qrsraqrq.
|
| 2. Encvq tebjgu. Sbphf ba pncghevat greevgbel naq arhgeny pvgvrf.
| Ihyarenoyr gb encvq nffnhyg, fvapr pncghevat pvgvrf jvyy qrcyrgr
| lbhe sbeprf va gur fubeg grez naq yrnir lbhe pncvgny ihyarenoyr.
|
| 3. Qrsrafvir tebjgu. Fybjre naq fgrnyguvre pncgher bs greevgbel
| naq arhgeny pvgvrf, jurer lbh tebj pnhgvbhfyl naq sbphf ba
| fheivivat encvq nffnhygf. Vg graqf gb ybfr gb encvq tebjgu, ohg
| jva ntnvafg encvq nffnhyg.
|
| Fb gur guerr fgengrtvrf unir n ebpx/cncre/fpvffbef eryngvbafuvc.
| Vs lbh abgvpr gung n cnegvphyne fgengrtl vf cbchyne va gur
| pheerag zrgntnzr, lbh pna nqwhfg lbhe bja fgengrtl nppbeqvatyl.
|
| Va rvtug-cynlre, lbh xabj gurer jvyy or frira ybfref. Vs lbh jnag
| gb or gur bar jvaare, lbh unir gb trg yhpxl. Fb vg znxrf frafr gb
| yrna gbjneqf n uvtu-inevnapr fgengrtl yvxr encvq tebjgu be encvq
| nffnhyg.
|
| Va gur zvq naq yngr tnzr, cynlref graq gb or birezngpurq ntnvafg
| rnpu bgure. Lbh'yy unir whfg 2 be 3 rzcverf erznvavat. Hfhnyyl
| bar rzcver jvyy or fvtavsvpnagyl fgebatre. Vs lbh ner gur jrnxre
| rzcver, lbhe orfg fubg gb jva vf trarenyyl gb sbez n znffvir nezl
| jvgu nyy bs lbhe sbeprf, punetr vagb lbhe bccbarag'f greevgbel,
| naq frr vs lbh pna gnxr gurve pncvgny qhevat n zbzrag jura vg'f
| cbbeyl qrsraqrq. Vs lbh ner gur fgebatre rzcver, lbh xabj lbh'er
| tbvat gb jva ol qrsnhyg qhr gb gur fabjonyy angher bs gur tnzr.
| Fb gur vzcbegnag guvat vf gb qrsraq ntnvafg gur fbeg bs fhecevfr
| nggnpx V whfg qrfpevorq. Gurer unir bayl orra n srj gvzrf jura V
| ybfg sebz n cbfvgvba bs fgeratgu, jura zl jrnxre bccbarag znantrq
| gb bhgcynl zr ba gur onfvp zrpunavpf bs greevgbel naq pvgl
| pncgher. Nernf jvgu n uvtu qrafvgl bs pvgvrf ner rfcrpvnyyl
| inyhnoyr gb gnxr pbageby bs, vs lbh pna znantr gb qb vg, juvpu
| graqf gb or qvssvphyg.
| Jabrov wrote:
| Deciphered if you don't feel like doing it and want to read it
| here:
|
| There are 3 basic strategies in the early game:
|
| 1. Rapid assault. Wait for a decent-sized army on your capital,
| then start charging around the map and hope that you are able
| to capture another player's capital while it's poorly defended.
|
| 2. Rapid growth. Focus on capturing territory and neutral
| cities. Vulnerable to rapid assault, since capturing cities
| will deplete your forces in the short term and leave your
| capital vulnerable.
|
| 3. Defensive growth. Slower and stealthier capture of territory
| and neutral cities, where you grow cautiously and focus on
| surviving rapid assaults. It tends to lose to rapid growth, but
| win against rapid assault.
|
| So the three strategies have a rock/paper/scissors
| relationship. If you notice that a particular strategy is
| popular in the current metagame, you can adjust your own
| strategy accordingly. In eight-player, you know there will be
| seven losers.
|
| If you want to be the one winner, you have to get lucky. So it
| makes sense to lean towards a high-variance strategy like rapid
| growth or rapid assault.
|
| In the mid and late game, players tend to be overmatched
| against each other. You'll have just 2 or 3 empires remaining.
| Usually one empire will be significantly stronger. If you are
| the weaker empire, your best shot to win is generally to form a
| massive army with all of your forces, charge into your
| opponent's territory, and see if you can take their capital
| during a moment when it's poorly defended. If you are the
| stronger empire, you know you're going to win by default due to
| the snowball nature of the game. So the important thing is to
| defend against the sort of surprise attack I just described.
| There have only been a few times when I lost from a position of
| strength, when my weaker opponent managed to outplay me on the
| basic mechanics of territory and city capture. Areas with a
| high density of cities are especially valuable to take control
| of, if you can manage to do it, which tends to be difficult.
| mat_epice wrote:
| If the GP wanted to hide it, it's a pretty strange thing to
| explicitly unhide it.
| jimmywetnips wrote:
| I appreciate it
| chrisweekly wrote:
| I appreciate it too. The deciphered version is clearly
| noted as such, which even respects the OP intent in
| giving readers the choice to skip reading it.
| chaps wrote:
| To be honest it's a strange thing to rot13. I get why OP
| did it, but I'm really not sure the benefit outweighs the
| negatives or that it accomplished what it was supposed to.
| Those aren't exactly spoilers in the same way as visual
| media, where a fraction of a second can reveal the whole
| story.
|
| Brb painting a shed.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| It's just one person's perspective on strategy not some
| sort of spoilers or cheat codes.
| veqq wrote:
| There are many problems here. Taking a neutral city costs 40
| troops, taking a long time to recuperate. You're better off
| looking for the enemy and attacking immediately, only taking
| neutral cities in the late game when it takes 20+ moves to
| deploy men against the enemy.
|
| Attacking the enemy is better than taking neutral territory,
| n.b. you want to do this towards the end of the turn so your
| conquered territory will respawn.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Was going to reply to say the same thing. It's tempting to
| take neutral cities at the start and sometimes I do it, but
| it's almost always a mistake, and I can usually tell when
| other players do it and they make easy pickings. It takes a
| long time to recover from taking a city, and the payoff
| isn't worth it until you have a lot of them.
|
| It's better to cover a large swathe of territory. This can
| hide where your general is, and every 25 turns you can
| collect armies from the squares. Build up that way and then
| you wait for someone next to you to get into a fight with
| someone else, or take a neutral city, and then bomb in on
| them in force when they can't defend, and take advantage of
| all of their hard work.
|
| There's also a bit of a "dark forest" aspect to the game,
| where you can benefit from being hidden for a long time at
| the beginning of the game, but you have to trade this off
| with the disadvantage of not being able to build adequate
| forces in that time.
|
| I'm "bubbles" in the game.
| ViktorV wrote:
| In high level play you have to manage your land, the hard
| thing is how to find the optimal route to collect your
| army: It's advisable to take around 15-18 turns to collect
| your army from an area and attack in the remaining 10-7
| turns, so you can attack before the enemy numbers increase.
| In high level 1v1 play what matters most is the area you
| have, if you can get +1 area per 25 rounds from your enemy
| you'll probably win.
|
| But! As both of you collect more and more area it gets
| really time consuming and after a point you just can't
| collect your army optimally. I'd argue that the biggest
| difference between skill levels at the highest levels is
| how efficient the collecting is. At that point you'll need
| cities. Always look for the opponent's counter to know how
| many cities your opponent has.
|
| Not that it matters but I was a top 5 1v1 player quite a
| while ago.
| _a_a_a_ wrote:
| Oh, well done mate! gratz. Maybe he ROT'd it for a reason.
| cced wrote:
| Seriously just post the strategy with a spoiler alert.
| whoChumpedwho wrote:
| rematch
| Jabrov wrote:
| Just tried this out for the first time and I'm hooked! It even
| works OK on mobile
| matrss wrote:
| I just played a few matches on my phone and there seems to be
| some bug that can detect you as afk and loose you the game for
| no apparent reason (i.e. while making moves). It's really a
| good game otherwise.
| reitzensteinm wrote:
| Blast from the past! I played this a bunch when it was first
| posted here, rose to #2 on the 8v8 US leader board, then went on
| to make a similar game called Starjack which hit ~1k concurrent
| players in 2019 (although it's no longer available).
|
| Luck plays a role, but the game is almost entirely about reading
| what other players are doing and thinking and reacting
| appropriately. It's poker, not chess. I had a win rate
| significantly over 50%, and hit a greater than 10 win streak at
| one point in 8v8.
|
| To add to some strategies posted here - although I haven't played
| in five years (around the time that movement started to be
| buffered), so things may have changed. I played a quick game to
| jog my memory while writing this (and won it of course!)
|
| The army count list tells you even more than exploring, and
| correctly reading what's happening is key to high level play.
|
| 1) An AFK player will slowly accumulate units on a predictable
| schedule. They may or may not come back. AFK to build up units
| and suddenly attack is a poor strategy, so you don't have to be
| worried about them, but there are edge cases where you can get
| stung.
|
| 2) Players that have army counts that drop together are adjacent
| - use this to understand where on the grid players are.
|
| 3) If only a single player has an army count drop, they're
| attacking a neutral city. It's a good time to attack as they've
| made a large, long term investment.
|
| 4) Players that have expanded but not lost any armies in a while
| are looking for a chance to attack - be careful if you're next to
| them.
|
| 5) When players fighting a war of attrition, stubbornly trading
| armies when they're not the only two left, they're probably not
| very good. A well timed swoop in at the end of the fight will
| capture all of the production. Don't get involved before that,
| because they're not very good and will start a war of attrition
| with you :)
|
| 6) At the start, neutral territory has an immense ROI. Capture as
| much as you possibly can. Don't worry too much about cities.
|
| 7) Generally, neutral territory with high numbers at the end of
| the game correlates with starting locations.
|
| 8) Pay a lot of attention to the star ratings of the players to
| know who is good and who isn't. Picking on beginners is fantastic
| strategy, because you can generally capture their armies intact.
|
| 9) Pay just as much attention to how well people are playing.
| Expert players will maximise neutral ground, and after the first
| pop at turn 25, you'll immediately see who you have to pay
| attention to.
|
| 10) If a player has launched a massed attack on you, it's often a
| better strategy to counterattack if you think you know where
| their base is better than they know where yours is. If you win,
| you'll capture their army intact and this often guarantees a win.
|
| 11) If you're not in the lead, throw everything you have into
| conflict where you think you have advantage. You are at this
| point "default dead", and if you play conservatively you'll lose.
|
| 12) If you are in the lead, you can now profitably consolidate
| cities without the power drop opening you up to attacks. Keep a
| good chunk of an army close to your base to prevent sneak
| attacks, and expand out to neutral territory as quickly as you
| can, preparing to jump on anyone that's weak. You're "default
| alive".
| taway789aaa6 wrote:
| I keep losing games because "you went AFK" even though I've been
| moving units. What is considered "AFK"? Pretty frustrating tbh
| calderknight wrote:
| in FFA, you need to take at least 10 tiles by turn 60. That
| means 11 tiles including your general. But if you encounter
| another player before turn 60 it won't make you afk no matter
| what.
| cjbprime wrote:
| (And note that to play well you'd want more like one tile
| every two-or-less seconds in FFA.)
| EduardoBautista wrote:
| It appears as though, for the keyboard shortcuts, they are
| matching on the "key", as in the actual letter, instead of the
| "code", which is more accurate regarding the actual position of
| the key.
|
| Just a minor annoyance for alternative keyboard layout users.
| Cool game, though!
| jtokoph wrote:
| This is something I never thought about. So key codes are based
| on the physical location of the key on a standard
| layout/qwerty, and changing your layout will cause the key
| value to change but not the code?
| an_ko wrote:
| Yes, approximately. In X11 at least, the hardware codes are
| called keycodes, and the human readable names are called
| keysyms. Example of the XkbKeycodeToKeysym function in use: h
| ttps://github.com/anko/xkbcat/blob/8abc3402cb679027a3bd0313..
| .
|
| Keysyms don't necessarily strictly match "key location";
| keyboards are allowed to output whatever codes they want for
| whatever key they want (see e.g. QMK firmware; often used in
| custom keyboards to do complex conditional key remapping),
| but they're in practice relatively consistent between common
| keys on most keyboards, and consistent on the same keyboard
| even if you switch keyboard layouts in software, unless you
| have some custom keyboard firmware which functionality is
| stateful.
| brainzap wrote:
| I thought the turns are fixed
| birracerveza wrote:
| This might have the best UX for onboarding I've ever seen. The
| game is pretty damn good too. Turn based but real time is really
| interesting.
|
| EDIT Ok this is addicting. Mobile version when? It is playable on
| mobile but having a touchable direction pad would work wonders.
| spintin wrote:
| You need WASD and E... and mouse. I have bluetooth keyboard +
| mouse on my tablet. XD
| fodkodrasz wrote:
| Great game, great UX.
|
| On suggestion for the UI: in replay the POV checkbox should be
| unfocused after click, or event bubbling stopped, as space-bar
| toggles both the autoplay and the POV now.
| avdlinde wrote:
| Neat clone of empire attack (now defunct,
| https://www.ianandrew.com/empire-attack). Used to play the 10 day
| variants there which were great fun, although more defense
| focused I think.
| vzhou842 wrote:
| original creator of generals.io here (late to the party)
|
| really cool to see people still having fun with this game I made
| in college! I sold the game a few years back because I didn't
| have time to properly maintain it, and I'm glad the new owners
| have kept it running.
|
| Linking to some past HN threads on this:
|
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13145781 original
| generals.io post
|
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13562866 launch of the Bot
| API
| umvi wrote:
| How much does a game/IP like that sell for, if I may ask?
| winterrx wrote:
| +1 also curious
| pton_xd wrote:
| 2-3x yearly net revenue, more if you're lucky.
|
| Revenue is ultimately a function of DAU, either via ad RPMs
| or IAP / subscription conversion rate.
|
| Also most sales agreements have a confidentiality covenant.
| umvi wrote:
| > 2-3x yearly net revenue, more if you're lucky.
|
| And what is the yearly net revenue of a game like generals?
|
| > Also most sales agreements have a confidentiality
| covenant
|
| Yeah that's super annoying. I'm mainly just interested in
| the ballpark. $10k? $50k? $100k? $500k? >$1m?
| spintin wrote:
| Did you ever consider to make the game persistent and MMO?
|
| If so what made you resign that?
| jzting wrote:
| hi victor, good to see you here! hope you're well :)
| gdsdfe wrote:
| I'm always amazed how a simple game can be fun
| voidfunc wrote:
| This used to be the game I played during long nights at my
| previous startup when I had downtime.
|
| Both good and bad memories.
| xaellison wrote:
| "This username is not okay." c'mon "barfnuggets" is not that
| offensive
| saulpw wrote:
| This game is a dopamine trap that has been bad for my brain
| (since 2020). I have a bogus entry in my /etc/hosts to keep me
| from playing it, and yet I too often disable it because I can't
| help myself. It's like crack.
| encoderer wrote:
| Yeah I had the same issue with it in like 2017-18. Very
| addictive and ultimately unsatisfying gameplay. Juice not worth
| the squeeze. If you struggle with distraction and dopamine
| loops just avoid it. You aren't missing much.
|
| I also did the hosts file block and removed it. It's just like
| any addictive behavior though: break the habit for a week or
| two and you won't miss it. For me I was visiting family for 2
| weeks and they had terrible internet so I couldn't win the game
| anyway.
| hardlianotion wrote:
| I saw this the first time around. Loved it. Then I started losing
| quickly...
| hardlianotion wrote:
| Anyway. Would do again.
| bl4kers wrote:
| I tried playing but it booted me for being "AFK" even though I
| was tapping the whole time
| psikomanjak wrote:
| I am loving this
| johnmorrison wrote:
| I love this game, got pretty into it around 2016/17 and rose to
| the top of the global 1v1 leaderboard for a while. Really cool to
| see it still running :D
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(page generated 2023-12-24 23:00 UTC)